Seamus Heaney (1983 series)

Part 1Reading from Poems 1965-1975 and Field Work, Seamus Heaney, recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, speaks of the landscape of Northern Ireland, the farm where he grew up, and the workers and craftsmen of the neighborhood: “The poet has to be a voice-box for something that is in the land and in the people.”

Part 2In this continued reading and conversation Heaney talks about the political tensions between Protestants and Catholics, as well as the more friendly relations he observed in the countryside: “The individual Protestant farmer in your own district was your neighbor, rather than your enemy.”